Australian Man Craig Wright Claims to Be Inventor of Bitcoin

The mystery of who is Satashi Nakamoto, the name most associated with the creation of Bitcoin, may finally be over. Today, in a flurry of publicity, Australian academic and entrepreneur Dr. Craig Wright claimed to be Nakamoto in a series of interviews, talking to the BBC, The Economist, the British edition of GQ, and posting his own elliptical (and highly technical) confession on his own blog.

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Wright's admission essentially boils down to revealing to the BBC and The Economist his possession of cryptographic keys and signatures used by Nakamoto during the early days of Bitcoins development—something that (unless Wright somehow came into possession of the keys by other means) only Nakamoto would have.

Nakamoto was the author of a white paper in 2008 that detailed how Bitcoin would work, and was one of the main contributors to the currency's open-source development in 2009, though he carefully kept all personally identifying information out of his communications. By 2010, he drifted away from the scene, but the intense interest in the identity of Nakamoto remained.

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Amateur sleuths and professional reporters have attempted to use a variety of means to find out who Nakamoto was. In 2014, Newsweek tracked down a man simply named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, and pegged him as the creator of Bitcoin, in a story that has since been widely discredited. In The New Yorker, reporter Joshua Davis analyzed linguistic tics in the writings of Nakamoto, and said it was likely Nakamoto was actually Michael Clear, a grad school student at Dublin's Trinity College. In December 2015, both Wired and Gizmodo published their own independent investigations, using a series of ostensibly hacked emails that to linked the creation of Bitcoin to Wright.

Wright framed his confession as an attempt to quash continued scrutiny into his life. "I have not done this because it is what I wanted. It's not because of my choice," Wright told the BBC. "I really do not want to be the public face of anything. I would rather not do it. I want to work, I want to keep doing what I want to do. I don't want money. I don't want fame. I don't want adoration. I just want to be left alone."

There's also the matter of Wright's home being raided by the Australian version of the IRS shortly after Wired and Gizmodo published their investigations in whether Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto. "We have lawyers negotiating with them over how much I have to pay," he said.

Why all the interest? Bitcoin wasn't the first cryptocurrency, but it has been, by far, the most successful and popular. There are currently an estimated 15.5 million Bitcoins in circulation, each worth (as of this writing) about $443 apiece, or about $6.8 billion USD in total. At its height, one Bitcoin sold for $1216.73. Nakamoto is widely believed to be holding on to about 1 million Bitcoins, meaning at one point he held nearly $1.2 billion in Bitcoin. Even at its current price, if the rumors are correct, Nakamoto still holds nearly a half billion USD in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin first gained notoriety due to its association with "darknet markets" such as the Silk Road, and later because of its wild fluctuations in value, which led to currency speculators flooding the Bitcoin market. A Bitcoin bought in September of 2013 for $120 USD would have been worth 1000 percent more if sold at the top of the Bitcoin bubble in January 2014.

Meanwhile, while several prominent figures within the cryptocurrency scene say they now believe that Wright is Nakamoto, there's still plenty of skepticism within the Bitcoin community that Craig Wright is truly Nakamoto. In the end, that may be one of the problems with a currency and a community that relies heavily on pseudonyms and anonymity—you can say you are someone or you can say you are not someone, and either way, there will be a large contingent of people who simply will not believe you.